Think Tank

The Ancient Art of Haranguing Has Moved to the Internet

By EMILY EAKIN

Published: August 10, 2002

he pamphlet is a one-man show," observed George Orwell approvingly. "One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and `highbrow' than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodical."

But Orwell, who pamphleteered on behalf of unpopular leftist causes, was not optimistic about the genre's prospects in an era dominated by newspapers devoted to what he perceived as an increasingly narrow range of mainstream opinion. "At any given moment there is a sort of all-prevailing orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss some large and uncomfortable fact," he lamented in 1948.

It seems Orwell may have been underestimating contemporary society. If he had lived to surf the Internet, for example, he might have been cheered to discover a flourishing new breed of pamphleteer: the blogger. Like its ink-and-paper antecedent, blogging is quick and cheap. Anyone with access to a Web site can post a weblog (or blog) linking readers to other online sources and promoting all manner of original opinion — serious, scurrilous, seditious and otherwise.

Today, according to Cameron Marlow, a doctoral student in electronic publishing at the Media Lab at M.I.T. and the creator of a weblog index, Blogdex, the number of blogs — liberally defined — has probably passed the half-million mark. That's up from just a few dozen five years ago, a spike that blog watchers say owes much to the events of Sept. 11, which spawned a whole new subgenre: the war blog. And while most online harangues presumably lack the public profile and scathing eloquence of history's most redoubtable pamphleteers (a typical passage from one of Milton's famous antiprelatical tracts, for example, refers to the Anglican church service as "the new-vomited paganism of sensual idolatry"), some bloggers, including the neoconservative journalist Andrew Sullivan, (Andrewsullivan .com), and Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee (InstaPundit.com), routinely draw more than 20,000 visitors a day and get cited by the mainstream press.

But the surest sign that blogging is no longer just a para-journalistic phenomenon is academic recognition: this fall, the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley is inaugurating a course that uses weblogs to investigate current debates over intellectual property.

"We wanted to explore a serious issue using a novel medium, " said Paul Grabowicz, director of new media programming at the school and a co-teacher of the course. "When you have journalists sitting down to write a weblog, what happens to objectivity? Obviously, a weblog is far more interactive. It starts to mix journalists and their sources together. Then you have those people responding to postings on weblogs: What do you do with those?"

The war on terrorism may be giving new life to the old-fashioned pamphlet as well. This winter, "9-11," a stinging indictment of American foreign policy packed into a 125-page, pocket-size pamphlet by the M.I.T. linguist Noam Chomsky, became a best seller in five countries, setting a new sales record for the Open Media pamphlet series published by Seven Stories Press. Begun during the Persian Gulf war in 1991 by a pair of Rutgers University graduates hawking Xeroxed copies of an antiwar tract on New York City street corners, the Open Media pamphlets now appear as glossy bound little books on hot-button topics — terrorism, the Middle East, civil liberties — by scholars like the radical historian Howard Zinn.

And now Open Media has some competition: the Prickly Paradigm Press, a scholarly pamphlet series begun by a pair of British anthropologists in 1993 as the Prickly Pear Press and recently revived by the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins. Mr. Sahlins raised money from friends and family to take over the series and convinced the University of Chicago Press to act as its distributor.

To celebrate its new incarnation, the renamed Prickly Paradigm is issuing five 50-page polemics this month on subjects ranging from the West's relationship to war to the unlikely affinities between left-wing cultural studies scholars and libertarian Wall Streeters. In "War of the Worlds: What About Peace?," Bruno Latour, a French theorist, argues that to achieve world peace the West must first acknowledge that it has long been at war, albeit covertly, a war masquerading as the "peaceful extension of Western natural Reason" to "the many Empires of Evil."

Other pamphlet writers reserve their ammunition for particular academic disciplines. In "Waiting For Foucault, Still," Mr. Sahlins tackles the theoretical excesses of anthropologists. In "New Consensus for Old: Cultural Studies From Left to Right," the critic Thomas Frank does the same for the field of cultural studies. By the 1990's, Mr. Frank contends, facile "cult stud" arguments about the "subversive potential" of a television sitcom or the "counter-hegemonic" impact of shopping malls had come to look uncomfortably like the market populism promoted by the pro-business right: both groups appear to equate consumerism with democratic self-expression.

Then there is Deirdre McCloskey's "Secret Sins of Economics." Ms. McCloskey, a professor of economics, history and English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, accuses her colleagues of producing endless thoerems and statistics that have nothing to do with the real world. "Imagine that instead of doing economic history about English agriculture in the 13th century, you were to do an economic history about an imaginary place," Ms. McCloskey explained in a telephone interview. "What would be the point of that? An economics department ought not to be about speculation and hypothetical worlds."

Of course, in today's media-saturated environment, these latest endeavors can hardly expect to sway opinion the way the pamphlet did in its glory days, the 17th and 18th centuries, when master rhetoricians like Milton, Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Thomas Paine regularly swamped the public sphere with two-penny treatises on burning social issues. (Published in January 1776, Paine's "Common Sense" sold half a million copies within a few months and is credited with transforming untold numbers of ambivalent colonists into ardent revolutionaries.)

Ms. McCloskey said she had jumped at the chance to write a pamphlet for Prickly Paradigm when Mr. Sahlins, an old poker-playing friend, asked her to contribute. "We really need some place between the formal journal article — mainly used for academic promotion — and the book,"she said.

But she confessed that she doubted whether her pamphlet would have much of an impact on her discipline. "I ought to have called myself Cassandra," she said ruefully. "I'm a student of the rhetoric of economics. You'd think that a student of that would realize that people aren't persuaded just because you have the correct argument."